June 01

• Off-duty cop terrorizes ICU staff with pistol; explains it's all just a drill: http://j.mp/a6GO7R
• http://bit.ly/QYOwS -- "After a taxicab crash in 1943 she found she could sing 'a higher F than ever before.'"
• Is there a tool out there to handle switching app focus based on eye-tracking? Are consumer-grade webcams good enough to do eye-tracking?
• http://j.mp/cxic4C "There's no empathy in Heaven because there is no mortality. There's no empathy in Utopia because there is no suffering."

June 02

• @Johnicholas Hm, that's awesome! There was a set of early gameplay prototypes released as well, a while back: http://bit.ly/1eK2Z8
• Who was it who joked in my vicinity about FLUDD being filled with oil dispersants in Super Mario Sunshine?
• No takers on my Craigslist ad for the free broken metal DDR pad in front of my old apt. East Bay, always making me throw away my own trash!
• @gwhitta In a thousand years, anthropologists will treasure this tidbit about the erstwhile editor-in-chief of PC Gamer.
• Chris Hecker's "Liner notes" for Spore: http://bit.ly/wG55Y
• Sir Ian McKellen performing the Fresh Prince of Bel Air theme: http://bit.ly/c3zQal

June 03

• Obscure rhymes: http://j.mp/cCOrDG "Yttrium, rhymes with liberum arbitrium, a legal term." Wasn't that pair in Young MC's "Bust a Move"?
• Print-quality artwork from Lucasarts adventure games: http://bit.ly/FFGe -- Grim Fandango is in there if you dig.
• Ten years later: tables are still easy and behave sensibly across browsers; CSS is still a mindfuck and a compatibility nightmare.
• Why write two articles when you can write one and publish it twice? http://bit.ly/9cJDRL http://bit.ly/b7zMir
• Why write two articles when you can write one and publish it twice? http://bit.ly/9cJDRL http://bit.ly/b7zMir
• Kieron Gillen, explaining male privilege to a games audience: http://j.mp/c0CMdG And the magic of targeted advertising: http://j.mp/dn9JlZ

June 04

• Bicycle helmets that stink when damaged and unsafe to use: http://bit.ly/98IenT
• http://bit.ly/aYbTZX -- Bears playing ice hockey? I think? I don't know if I trust my brain any more.
• http://bit.ly/6Sa9CJ -- "If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon."
• http://j.mp/aPYwpV "Artists have been [ordered to lighten the skin tone] of children depicted in a public mural at a Prescott, AZ school."
• PopCap founder Jason Kapalka on being recognized on the street -- or, rather, in a bowling alley on Seniors Night: http://bit.ly/9Z3NML

June 05

• The geological situation below Guatemala City: http://j.mp/91JUPV -- Pumice being eaten away by strong water flow, like broken sewage pipes.
• The visual analog of the Wilhelm: http://bit.ly/ak0chC
• Pamelia Kurstin playing the theremin: http://bit.ly/31ikF (Highlight: walking bass at ~2:50)
• Remember when Gmail published everyone's contacts, outing confidential journalist sources everywhere? Yahoo wants in: http://j.mp/9qx9tm

June 06

• I try not to be too hard on the past; some of my fondest memories are from then.
• Looks like the magic query string flag to get Google to stop silently correcting your searches is "nfpr." Any idea how to make that default?
• (Extra credit: try searching for "google nfpr." Google gives you a full page of results for "NFPA" and doesn't even mention "nfpr.")
• @Laroquod Do you have other recommended science podcasts? I've been looking for more stuff like this and Radiolab.
• http://bit.ly/alos4a "The template for a video game exists on the disc but where does the experience of the video game as played exist?"
• The Elitzur-Vaidman bomb-tester uses quantum mechanics to test whether your bomb functions without actually exploding it: http://j.mp/d6RqrY
• (P.S. It's not just a thought-experiment. They built one and it works.)
• I have to imagine that most of my followers read xkcd already, but by god, today's is *sublime*: http://xkcd.com/750/

June 07

• Mario Galaxy 2 is using a lot of the platformer mechanic ideas that have been bouncing around in my head for years. Saves me the trouble.
• Blather Endlessly About Apple Day wouldn't be such a nuisance if it only happened once a year.
• http://bit.ly/cURrSm -- Once I asked a restaurant pianist to play "Happy Birthday" in a minor key. I think it made his day.
• Political cartoons are just as subtle in the Star Wars universe: http://bit.ly/8ZV8lM
• Ninja Watson comes closer without moving: http://bit.ly/9Vu7jo

June 08

• Via @Halsted: For all you fans of lovecraft-inspired blue sky platformers, Eversion is now available on steam! (http://bit.ly/ar032U)
• Instead of padding Sonic games with slow parts, they really ought to try a racing game structure. Run levels repeatedly for time or points.
• Mario Marathon 3 teaser trailer: http://bit.ly/dmqAOp -- Okay, I'm pumped. Let's do this.
• Saudi Clerics Advocate Adult Breast-Feeding: http://j.mp/9n9NXO -- "No need to dirty a bottle."
• "BP ordered shortcut on day of blast": http://j.mp/91GF4o "BP lied to us from day one. We could have stopped the oil": http://j.mp/9FZcmq
• Here is how you leverage Capitalism to fix this problem: make the stockholders pay, and accountability will take care of itself.

June 09

• Just seeing the model for "Throwback Galaxy" on the overworld map made my day.
• (3:11:28 PM) Danny: i should start saying 'no homophone' in place of 'no pun intended', where appropriate

June 10

• Rock Band 3: http://bit.ly/desc5m -- Six-stringed electric guitar controller; two octave keyboard; drums with separate cymbals.
• Rushed out the door after shower; braiding beard on the BART. Is this weird? I don't know, but I'm avoiding eye-contact more than usual.

June 11

• 120 stars into Mario Galaxy 2, I can say that it's no harder than the original, but it does feel more like it was designed by assholes.
• Rock Band 3 to support MIDI input: http://bit.ly/be9zxc -- If I still lived on the ground floor I could plug my electronic drum kit into it!
• "Poodle Exercise With Humans": http://bit.ly/HEORR -- "Pump the arms like you're in the mud."
• This just in: jaguars love Calvin Klein's Obsession for Men: http://bit.ly/cY8LuY
• http://bit.ly/crNPmn -- "Professional computer gamers have the reactions of fighter pilots but the bodies of 60-year-old chain smokers."

June 12

• http://bit.ly/bIKLJb -- "I think public cell phone users are annoying because mind-reading is hard work. Let me explain."
• I think the green stars in Flip-Swap Galaxy might be the first goal in any 3D Mario game that *requires* you to triple-jump.

June 13

• You can't always not get what you don't want. But if you try sometimes, you just might find you don't get what you don't need.
• @pnewnan Yes. Be careful what you wish for.
• So I made an Arkham Horror encounter dealer: http://bit.ly/cCE5HB More info: http://bit.ly/9GFMoi
• (Spent 6 hours scraping/organizing card data; 6 hours coding app. 219 lines of HTML-scraping Python; 225 lines of code in final app.)
• Tom Francis of PC Gamer UK breaks down a preview demo of Deus Ex 3: http://bit.ly/aMzUbf -- Cautiously optimistic over here!

June 14

• The answer is: toothpaste! I'm certain my earlobe ball blog post will end up being my biggest contribution to humanity: http://j.mp/aKVgMv
• The science behind behavioral profiling at airports: http://j.mp/cHUIUy -- "People would achieve similar hit rates if they flipped a coin."
• The touching story of The Guy in the Get Lamp DVD artwork spread http://bit.ly/dCnCoB
• It's baby sloth time! http://bit.ly/9UAPC5
• Statix / Psychic Link (a.k.a. Alex Evans / Media Molecule) on the Little Big Planet rendering engine: http://bit.ly/aPQWqp
• http://j.mp/dve9Vb $1 trillion in mineral deposits found in Afghanistan. This'd be awesome for them except for the whole resource war thing.
• "Share your first tweet with the world!" -- Always a good sign.

June 15

• That's what they call it, because "t'aint" the lower lip, and "t'aint" the chin.
• Man, only 5 years left to invent power laces and jackets that adjust their sleeve lengths while saying "size adjusting: fit" in 80s-era TTS.
• The 3DS looks like it has a serious GPU bump over the DS: http://bit.ly/bRJGH7 -- And it's gonna be rendering that twice per frame.
• And it has the analog thumb-pad. I really do hope they re-re-make Mario 64 for it. That would be the Mario 64 DS that Mario 64 deserved.

June 16

• Rock Band 3 will teach you to actually play guitar, for serious: http://bit.ly/aea8hd
• Watched "The A-Team." Was mostly good. I could go for a whole movie of Pike in the back of an FBI car.

June 17

• Venetian Snares on Rock Band drums: http://bit.ly/bEjrVd
• Another: http://j.mp/ch5IEw -- In this case the fun part isn't the hunam drummer trying to keep up, it's the animated drummer freaking out.
• People have been yelling all night. Did someone score more points than someone else?

June 18

• Hey, Alex returned a stack of games I thought I'd lost to me, including Ico and Rez. Now I don't have to pay money dollars to replace them!
• http://bit.ly/alc0aT -- Portal writer Erik Wolpaw is sick of cake jokes too. That's a relief.
• 190 stars into Mario Galaxy 2, my favorite green stars are the ones attached to new and interesting places. Unfortunately, these are rare.
• Mostly they're just hanging somewhere hard to reach, or even less interesting, off a ledge over the void; not hard to reach, just risky.
• I think what I'm looking for is a token representing exploration of a space, not just navigating a jumping puzzle.
• But I love that the green stars stretch the range of the controls; in the main game, much of Mario's capability acts just as safety margin.
• (I talk smack about Mario Galaxy 2, but bear in mind that I value its existence more than anybody you know -- except maybe you, Ryan.)

June 20

• http://j.mp/aHZCjL -- "A student created a major traffic jam when he hurled a puppy at a group of Hell's Angels and escaped on a bulldozer."
• What playing Super Mario Bros. sounded like before the invention of talkies: http://bit.ly/bmX68J

June 21

• In a perfect world, I'd tell you rather than asking if this massively-multiplayer plank-balancer is as fun as it looks: http://j.mp/cpjn3h
• Yes, you really are rolling more ones than you should be: http://bit.ly/1WWDPL
• More on the failure of consumer dice: http://bit.ly/V1RT

June 22

• If I'd known I'd spend 8 hours failing to install Windows on my EeePC, I'd've paid the extra $100 for the EeePC with Windows installed.
• ... yep, that's definitely a dislodged filling chunk.
• Toru Iwatani's design sketches for Pac-Man: http://bit.ly/9WdGyD
• O god, Galaxy 2's 242nd star is *brutal*. Like they hired on Matthew Smiith to redesign the Sinking Lava Spire Daredevil Run.
• http://bit.ly/aijFp2 -- "People will drive recklessly until the number of deaths reaches the maximum they can tolerate."
• Hey, awesome, after eating this peanut butter toast, the hole left by the filling I just lost is gone! Who needs dentists?
• Can't tell whether the Scott Pilgrim trailer is too pandery or I'm too old. From the era of the pander-material, I'm guessing the former.

June 23

• "Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution." What will your favorite institution try to preserve?
• When Economics starts trying to preserve Scarcity, it's going to be a rough patch. DRM just gives you a taste of it.
• http://bit.ly/bvfj45 -- Have you ever heard of this a/an rule? I'm more inclined to assume any instances are due to sloppy insertions.
• Judge Sides With Google in Viacom Video Suit: http://j.mp/bePi3y
• Hah, after you finish, Mario Galaxy 2 sends you a photo of your stars on the Wii message board. By which I mean a grid of 242 star icons.
• Aw man, Mario Marathon is this weekend and I'm not going to be vegging in front of my computer the entire time. You'll have to veg for two.

June 25

• Self-replicating pattern created in Conway's Life: http://bit.ly/d457qN
• First-person video of raven assaulting RC plane: http://bit.ly/b6vYrJ
• Warren Spector makes the 3DS sound pretty incredible: http://bit.ly/bPoA66
• Grub4dos can't boot from my iso because it's fragmented. The defragger can't defrag it because there's not enough free space on the iso.
• Hypothetically speaking, if I were in Hell, would you be permitted to tell me so?
• Oh man, I can just get a USB CD-ROM drive for $13 on Amazon. Even if it doesn't work, I get 3 days of shipping time to not think about it.

June 26

• Watching Matt play Final Fanasy 13 in SD. Except for the framerate, it doesn't look much better than Shadow of the Colossus on the same TV.
• Mario Marathon is about to start Super Mario Galaxy 2: http://bit.ly/CIXMb -- Raised $30k for Child's Play Charity so far.

June 27

• Driving to LA with family; reading text adventures aloud from netbook.

June 29

• Underwater images of waves breaking: http://bit.ly/bqP97U
• http://bit.ly/aGsamV -- The force is strong with this one.
• If you can observe and label a "supernatural" phenomenon, it's patterned enough to fall under the domain of science.
• Everything you might call "spiritual," I call human psychology. The difference isn't too functional, but it's not just nomenclature either.
• The difference: I attribute none of it to the universe. It's still important and worth pursuing. But it's not magic. We're just all crazy.
• Level 3 of PuLiRuLa: http://bit.ly/sVdcE

June 30

• The unofficial pixel-art YouTube-format pick-a-path adaptation of Twilight: http://bit.ly/bpfLc7
• Here's a downloadable version of the Arkham Horror encounter dealer I was working on: http://bit.ly/bGAGrg (More info: http://bit.ly/9GFMoi)
• Steam won't let me buy the Left 4 Dead 4-pack, because I own it already. I guess Valve decided they have enough money. Fair enough!
• PSA: Drowning doesn't look like drowning: http://bit.ly/agi9XI

On Twitter: @mogwai_poet